Rare Footage: Wild Elephants “Mourn” Their Dead

Rare Footage: Wild Elephants “Mourn” Their Dead

August 31, 2016 - Two weeks after the death of their matriarch, Victoria, wild elephants in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya continue to visit her remains and display unique behaviors seen only in their species. This video shows groups of elephant families using their trunks to touch and explore Victoria's carcass while standing peacefully in place. This rarely seen event is giving researchers insight into the elephants' social relationships. Though the researchers are hesitant to call this behavior "mourning," they do believe elephants display a specific reaction in response to the death of one of their own.

Voice of SHIFRA GOLDENBERG, PhD Candidate, Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University and Save the Elephants.

I was pretty amazing by this scene when we came across it. You know, you do hear these stories about elephants showing this really keen interest in dead bodies of their species. And it’s just a very a hard thing to observe. So to find a body to begin with is not that easy. And then to be able to witness what happens afterwards where you have these other elephants exploring the body is an extremely rare event.

We found this group of elephants. They were kind of a resting group. They were all bunched together. And when they started to disperse, we found that their matriarch died. She was an old female. She was estimated to be about 55 years old at the time that she died.

The video that we’re looking at is two to three weeks after she died. And so at that point you can tell that the body is kind of decayed a little bit and predators have been on it so most of the meat has been taken off, but the elephants that were there day and that spot were still really interested in her body.

So we’re seeing a lot of exploration and you can see that these elephants are kind of holding their trunks out and smelling the body. There’s a young male call Umtata who is picking up her dried ear and kind of exploring inside her skull and really investigating. And the other thing that I was just really amazed by was how much standing around there was. You know, elephants don’t waste a lot of time in terms of feeding. They have to feed for 20 hours a day just to get all the nutrients that they need. But they were just standing there. And they weren’t resting but they were just kind of standing. And I thought that was really interesting.

If you look for it you can see that some of the elephants have streaming from their temporal glands. These are glands that behind their eyes that stream temporin when they have elevated levels of emotion. So you see them do it when they’re excited or you see them do it when they’re really stressed.

And the interesting thing is that, you know, the video that we’re looking at those are not her relatives at all. She knew them. Those are other elephants in the population that also use that area a lot.

I don’t know if elephants are mourning. When I think of mourning, I think of that as a term that I know only really applies to humans. You know, if a person I know loses a somebody in their life I can ask them how they’re feeling and they can tell me about grief. I can’t do that with an elephant so it’s very hard to know if they mourn in the same way that we mourn. They’re very different animals from us.

But one thing that we do know is that they have extremely strong social bonds which is very similar to humans. And we see them exhibit these behaviors at dead bodies that they don’t exhibit otherwise. So there’s certainly something going on there. Whether it’s mourning, I can’t say. But it’s certainly an interest in their dead.

Rare Footage: Wild Elephants “Mourn” Their Dead

August 31, 2016 - Two weeks after the death of their matriarch, Victoria, wild elephants in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya continue to visit her remains and display unique behaviors seen only in their species. This video shows groups of elephant families using their trunks to touch and explore Victoria's carcass while standing peacefully in place. This rarely seen event is giving researchers insight into the elephants' social relationships. Though the researchers are hesitant to call this behavior "mourning," they do believe elephants display a specific reaction in response to the death of one of their own.